User blog:Holroy/Some griefances on Categorisation
Lately I've been reviewing how pages have been categorised on this Wiki, and as part of that process I've seen some strange habits which I would like to address. Use Proper Sub-Categories When adding a category to a category you're creating a sub-category, and this creates a tree of categories. A proper sub-category is to be a subset of the parent category, and all the items of the sub-category should be present in the parent category. A sub category should normally not contain elements which are not logically part of the parent categories. Also remember that the sub-category is defined on the sub-category page, not the parent page. I.e to make Category:Mobs a sub-category of Category:Entity you need to add Mobs to the Entity category page. Avoid Looping Categories Please avoid to loop categories, either direct loops or indirect loops through sub-categories. Categories does not Belong to the Category When categorising, please do not add the category as a sub-category to itself. The Category:Mobs does not belong to Category:Mobs. This creates a meaningless, category loop, indicating that Mobs are a subset of Mobs, which are a subset of Mobs, which are a subset of ... You get the drift. Parents of Parent Categories are not Sub-Categories Given the Category tree of Category:Entity -> Category:Mobs -> Category:Hostile Mobs, then it's not natural to add Category:Entity to the Category:Hostile Mobs. This creates an indirect loop, which is just as bad as the direct loop. A Note on Formatting If you add the text Category:CategoryName it will add the page to the categories where you place it on a page. If you on the other hand want to just link to the category page, use Category:CategoryName. That is, add a colon in front of Category: to add a link, instead of actually categorising the page. These kind of changes needs to be done in the Source Editor, and not the visual editors. Does a Page Belong to All Parent Categories? So far, I've been talking about how to handle categories and proper sub-categorisation. Now onto the harder question related to what categories should the actual pages belong to. Currently there is a trend to categorise pages into the lowest and most specific sub-categories and all or most of the parent categories. Do we really want this? Is it correct for the Zombie to belong to all of these: Category:Entity, Category:Mobs, Category:Hostile Mobs and Category:Unarmed? All of which are proper sub-categories of each other. Note that I don't mind it also belongs to Category:The Overworld which is a parallell categorisation of where you might find Zombies. Similarily is really all these categories needed for the Carrot page: Category:Food, Category:Items, Category:Farming, Category:Breeding Food, Category:Mob Drop, Category:Renewable, Category:Update 0.8.0, Category:Crop, Category:Organic, Category:Naturally Spawning Blocks/Items and Category:The Overworld So currently I see these two alternatives for how to handle categorisation: * Some/most of parent and sub-categories – This is the current option * The most specific sub-categories – Only the most specific sub-category of relecant category trees What is your opinion on which category a page belongs to, or how to handle this issue? Please comment and discuss below. Maybe in due time we can arrange a poll, and choose where to proceed as a community. Category:Blog posts